It’s extraordinary how the ego can take anything and corrupt it.
Meditation.
Breathwork.
Yoga.
Self-inquiry and inner work.
Everything can be corrupted.
To help you identify how you may corrupting your inner work or how your clients/students/mentees may be corrupting what you’re teaching, the following are some of the ego structures that I’ve seen corrupt inner work. Towards the end, I mention the #1 and #2 specific ways that inner work is most often corrupted.
The way to fix this is–as always–simple.
BTW, if you are a practitioner and given how spiritual practices have been getting incorporated into everything from sports to personal development to therapy, please forward this link onto your colleagues.
The Self-soothing Ego
The self-soothing ego only wants to feel better.
People entangled with their self-soothing ego confuse inner work as a means to feeling better.
Not resolving issues.
The annoying part is that this student will constantly say that they’re doing inner work. They get really frustrated and tired of “inner work” too. However, they expose the truth that all they want is to feel better when they say things like:
“It’s not working” or “It’s not working anymore.”
What does it mean that it’s working?
“I don’t feel better” or “I feel worse than before.”
In the long run, a lot of inner work certainly makes us feel better in letting go of issues so that we’re no longer tormented by them. But a spiritual freedom seeker has to go to the source of the pain to surrender to it and listen to it.
That often means feeling worse before feeling better.
Self-soothing egos pull out the minute things get a trifle uncomfortable. They can do what I call “the yo-yo.” They drop down into a piece of an issue usually being experienced in lower portions of the body. Then they bounce back up to their minds before anything can really happen. Some drop in enough to get upset, then they confuse being upset as processing emotions.
This yo-yoing/false processing/performative processing (because there are performance egos that put on a big show for themselves and others to feel like they’re doing something) can lead people to re-traumatizing themselves as well as wasting decades of their lives and $10s of thousands of dollars.
The Spiritual Bypass: The Illusion of Avoiding Your Difficulties
And they have to start at the beginning if they really want to get serious. That’s a humbling realization.
The Self-punisher Ego
Let’s go to the other side of the spectrum.
The self-punisher ego uses inner work to make themselves feel miserable or bad. They take a different point of view than the self-soother ego. They think that feeling crappy is some kind of progress.
If they’re not feeling bad, then they aren’t progressing, in their minds.
Bear in mind that people have multiple ego structures and can have several of the ones I’m listing in this spiritual awakening blog post and more. It is legitimately maddening.
It’s insane.
The spiritual freedom path is a path out of insanity, but the self-punisher other and ego structures won’t go without a fight.
Speaking of which, this ego structure may also like to fight. They are an aggressive fixer/fighter way of orienting to life and to one’s self. They’re a hammer, and every issue is a nail to be hammered down.
The whole attitude is a mess. There’s a whole world of kindness, love, and joy that this structure may say it wants, but will never decide that it can have. The joyful side of life is too unknown.
It scares them.
So people entangled with the self-punisher find some of the craziest and most intense spiritual tools to hammer themselves. They may have big spiritual experiences, but the reality is that they’re just as locked into their basic ego structure as before.
The Fixater Ego
The fixater ego fixtates/focuses all its attention on a specific issue or “problem.”
Sometimes, it’s a problem.
Sometimes, not.
The more clever egos find an actual problem that they need to address within themselves, but it’s not the problem that needs to be addressed NOW.
Surrendering to the present moment is the doorway to true inner work.
The house is on fire. The problem is to put out the fire.
Yes, the paint is peeling in the garage too. Yes, that’s a problem. It’s not the one that needs to be dealt with NOW.
Road rage is a popular false issue.
I’ve heard so many students use road rage as their issue.
It’s ridiculous.
And they know better.
But it’s a safe issue.
They can get other people to sympathize with the road rage issue, and they don’t have to take on the toxic parent, atone to a partner they’ve hurt, end the drug addiction, or work through the guilt and shame of poorly raising their children.
Those are serious issues, and they are doorway issues into the deeper issues that set up those situations.
But when that doorway is never opened, the subsequent doorways are never seen. And the non-issue issue like road rage keeps coming back, so the person never really feels like they’ve progressed.
Although they work really hard to convince themselves that they’ve progressed.
7 Signs of Spiritual Progress (and 7 Signs that Are Not Progress)
The Numbing Ego
The numbing ego keeps a person so numb that they can’t even start inner work.
If you can’t feel, you can’t heal.
If you can’t feel, you can correctly identify what is going inside you, listen to your heart, or understand your body.
If you can’t feel, you can disentangle what is truth and what is ego.
I get asked about this all the time.
“How do I tell what is truth and what is ego?”
Start by unnumbing those fingers so that they can deftly pick at the tangled knot. Numb fingers can’t do much of anything. Everything feels the same.
Numbing can be done with:
- Drugs
- Alcohol
- Nicotine
- High-state experiences of all kinds (substance or non-substance induced)
- Busy-ness (traveling a lot, listening to lots of music, workaholism, and general over-stimulation), and plenty more, including spiritual tools.
Numbing Yourself to Life and Over-stimulation
If this is you, it’s time to be honest with yourself.
You are trying to change without feeling what needs to be changed. You sat on your foot during meditation. It’s numb. You have no idea what else is going on with it.
Are there thorns in the foot?
Torn ligaments?
You can’t tell.
But you sure can’t stand on that foot.
Inner work can’t start until a person can feel what is happening RIGHT NOW.
And guess what?
It doesn’t feel good.
That’s why numb-ers do what they do. They don’t want to feel the pain. So they numb. With some of these things like nicotine, they make themselves feel bad in a different way because they feel like they have control.
The People-pleaser Ego
The people-please ego is a big liar.
They have no interest in saying what is going on with them.
They are only trying to figure out what to say to get someone to like them.
Whoever the practitioner is, they cannot offer any useful advice because they have no idea what the actual situation is.
The people-pleaser confuses approval as a form of love and a way to make whatever their issues are go away. Of course, this doesn’t work. The unresolved ego issues remain. The people-pleaser can never get enough approval.
They need more.
And more.
And more.
And more.
Perhaps you have this structure, and you see how trapped you are. But it never feels like you can get out of it.
Come back to awareness. With all these ego structures, coming back to awareness and breathing to calm the nervous system is the start of the way out.
Awareness has never been trapped in these experiences, and egos are truly full bodied experiences, not just ideas in a person’s mind.
The Number One Way to Corrupt Inner Work
There are many more ego structures: bargaining egos, runner egos, etc. As I said earlier, you can have multiple; some conflict, and some are accomplices to one another.
Write them do.
Draw them out.
Create a map of the ego dumpster fire that has you locked in suffering.
With that said, The number one way to corrupt inner work is simply:
Not doing inner work.
Not doing the inner work that is recommended by myself, your practitioner, or yourself is the number one method for corrupting inner work. I’ve watched this happen since 2010.
This is utterly bizarre to me.
People come and search out a teacher only to not do what is recommended.
For many people, they argue that they are “trying to do what is right for them,” but this is a false sense of autonomy.
It’s fear.
It’s fear of being seen.
It’s fear of being hurt.
It’s fear of the shame of seeing all the crap you’ve done to yourself. It’s the fear that you have to confront yourself as your greatest abuser and en-trapper in the slavery of ego.
Who wants to go through all of that?
So people don’t.
The Number Two Way of Corrupting Inner Work
The second one is half-assing what is done.
By not really doing it, the student fails.
Then they can come back to a teacher/practitioner/guide and say they tried.
In their hearts, they know that they didn’t.
It’s like when a career change is being used as a spiritual tool to show a person ego issues and help them out of self-imposed poverty. Yes. People put themselves into places of poverty.
And yes. The spiritual tool can be this practical.
The person applies for jobs, but they do their resumes and coverletters poorly. They don’t prepare for the interviews, and those go badly. They don’t get hired.
They did the recommendation, but they really didn’t.
In their hearts, they know this is the truth, but particularly with people-pleaser egos, they feel safe to say, “Hey, I did it. It didn’t work.”
These crazy distortions, again, bring only continued suffering and trap people in predicable and often damaging patterns.
Getting Stuck and Incomplete Spiritual Awakening Integrations
The Power of Sincerity
Once again, there are many other types of egos that corrupt spiritual inner work.
They all attempt to “protect” the person with familiar patterns, but they’re all traps.
In the end, it’s sincerity that’s critical.
Do you really want to wake up?
Do you really want to get out of the trap of the ego?
If you do, then you’ll see these ego structures inside yourself. You’ll come back to awareness to step out of the patterns. You’ll do whatever recommendation is necessary to break out of suffering and realize spiritual freedom.
It’s all possible.
You can discover your freedom.
But is that what you really want?
If you want help with understanding your many ego structures, you can reach out for a one-on-one session.